Trust Built With Nobody Watching

Life gives feedback long before it gives clarity. Each time you move through a hard season without abandoning yourself, that lesson lands deeper than any advice could.

Healing Thoughts now speaks in sound.
Each new letter comes with a full audio version, scored with an original soundtrack.
Free readers receive the text as always.
Paid subscribers hear the words as they were written.
And for a limited time you can save 20% off all plans by using the link below.

Your support keeps this work alive. It lets me keep building something honest. A space where the words don’t just exist, they breathe.

---

I used to send screenshots to friends
just to ask,
“Am I overreacting?”

Their replies decided whether I was allowed to hurt.

I kept replaying arguments in my head
like court cases.
Every sentence went on trial.
My body already knew the verdict.
My mind still wanted a jury.

The first time I believed my own read on someone,
I lost a circle.
The first time I believed my own read on me,
I lost a role.

No one clapped.
No one said I did the right thing.

I just slept better.

Turns out the only witness that mattered
was the one who stopped leaving the room
when I spoke.

“Self-trust grows quietly in the absence of witnesses.”

For a long time, I treated my own perception like a suspect. I grew up around a man who denied what was right in front of us. Bottles on the counter, holes in the wall, tension so thick my shoulders knew it before my mind did. If I said it out loud, I was dramatic. Disrespectful. Too sensitive. So I learned to doubt myself before anyone else had to. That pattern followed me into friendships, relationships, work. Someone could cross a line and my first response was self-doubt.

When you grow up like that, your nervous system learns to outsource reality. You scan faces to see if your feelings are allowed. You watch tone, micro-expressions, the way a room gets quiet. Hypervigilance becomes a survival response. The body notices the spike in heart rate. The shallow breath. The stomach that tightens every time a certain name lights up your phone. But the mind has been trained to override all of that and say, “Relax, you’re probably overreacting.” This can feel like self-abandonment with good manners.

Therapists talk about self-trust like it is a concept. In practice, it is repetition. It is a series of small, uncomfortable experiments. You notice the signal in your body. You let it count as data. You change one tiny behavior in response. You leave the conversation two minutes earlier than usual. You say “no” to a favor that drains you. You stop explaining a boundary twelve different ways and hold it once. Nobody sees those moments. There is no applause. But your nervous system does what it always does. It tracks experience. It records that this time you listened and the sky did not fall.

The day you blocked a number and did not unblock it. The moment you noticed you were being love-bombed and slowed the pace instead of speeding up. The shift where you stopped telling certain stories to people who kept minimizing them. No one handed you a certificate for those choices. Still, they happened. Self-trust grows in those quiet rooms, with no witnesses, when you decide your inner yes and no are worth honoring even if nobody else agrees.

You do not have to fix your whole life tonight. You can start with one small decision where you choose your own view of reality over someone’s convenient version. The body will notice. It always does. Over time, those quiet choices stack. One day you look back and realize you are no longer asking twelve people for permission to feel what you already feel. You are listening to the one person who has been there for every moment. You.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

Where are you already choosing your own read on a situation, even if no one else ever knows you did?

If you’re peeling back wounds like this one,
the 365-Day Shadow Work Journals were made for moments like these.
They speak the same language you do. Truth before comfort.
Explore the journals →

Sprinkles of Healing Confetti:

🕊 New messages drop most weekdays. Quiet, but not gentle.
🔥 Paid subscribers keep the wounds lit long enough to be named.
📚 When the pain overflows, it becomes a book.
🧢 Healing wears well when stitched into something real.
☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
🖤 Shadow Thoughts carries the pieces too jagged for here.

If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone. Healing Thoughts is where I say the quiet parts loudly. If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. It’s only getting rawer from here.

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)